Project 2025: What Is It and How Would It Impact Gen Z and Millennials?
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Vice President Kamala Harris’s first remarks in launching her 2024 presidential campaign included a warning: “Donald Trump wants to take our country backward. His extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class,” she said.
As Americans look toward November, Project 2025 has been thrust into the heart of our national conversation. Before President Biden stepped down from the 2024 race, his reelection campaign had started to center the initiative in its messaging, making the Trump campaign synonymous with it.
But what exactly is Project 2025? To start, it is intended as a coalescing of the modern conservative movement’s political objectives, laid out for presidential use following next year’s inauguration day. But, youth organizers rallying against the project tell Teen Vogue, there’s much more to it than that.
Here’s what you need to know:
What is Project 2025?
The Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project is a group of initiatives intended to guide the next Republican presidential administration — Donald Trump's, should he be reelected to the presidency in November. Project 2025 shorthand, however, refers most often to “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” a portfolio of policy proposals written and published by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank that was originally founded in 1973.
Project 2025’s policy agenda is one pillar of the organization’s broader playbook against what it calls “The Great Awokening.” The document reads: “Ultimately, the Left does not believe that all men are created equal — they think they are special. [...] They don’t think any citizen, state, business, church, or charity should be allowed any freedom until they first bend the knee.”
In its foreword, Project 2025 claims that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are threats to the First Amendment; advocates for a gag order on the use of the words “abortion” and “reproductive health” in federal legislation; compares gender identity to pornography; calls for a national ban on pornography; accuses transgender Americans of being child predators; calls for the arrest and prosecution of educators and public librarians who share books or resources centered on gender identity, and more.
This sounds like exaggeration. It is not. This is all on page five — front-loaded onto the most immediate and accessible portion of this dizzying 922-page agenda.
Most simply, critics say, Project 2025 is a startling vision for a drastically overhauled federal government in the US under a far-right presidential administration. It is intended to significantly warp our democracy, making it easier for the far-right to both consolidate and maintain significant power in Washington, DC, and beyond.
Who is behind Project 2025?
Project 2025 was written and published as an independent project launched by the Heritage Foundation. The project's recommendations have been framed as suggestions for whichever candidate would eventually claim the Republican Party’s nomination for president of the United States, but the direct line from Project 2025’s key authors to the former Trump administration and Trump's current presidential campaign is undeniable.
Political researcher and journalist Judd Legum identified that, out of “the 38 people responsible for writing and editing Project 2025, 31 were appointed or nominated to positions in the Trump administration and transition.” This includes the author of Trump’s policy separating migrant children from their parents, plus a key shepherd of border wall funding, according to Legum’s reporting. Co-editors of Project 2025, Paul Dans and Steve Groves, both served in senior-level positions in the Trump administration, and several people on the project’s team currently hold key positions with the Republican National Committee and Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
In recent weeks Trump and his campaign have attempted to distance themselves from the agenda, going so far as to claim complete ignorance regarding its existence. This comes amid mounting public awareness of Project 2025 and plummeting support for its contents, according to a July poll from Navigator Research. On July 5, Trump took to Truth Social to claim: “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Also recently, however, Trump referred to one of the authors involved with the project as a critical voice in his potential second administration’s plans for re-envisioning America.
The Heritage Foundation is no stranger to outlining and advancing long-term roadmaps for conservative presidential administrations. In 1981, the Heritage Foundation published a similar guidebook for the incoming Reagan administration, as the group cites in the Project 2025 foreword. The foundation boasts that “by the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy.”
“Project 2025, or Agenda 47, or the RNC platform — they all have different names, but essentially are saying the same thing,” Claire Simon, communications director and elections chair for Gen Z for Change, tells Teen Vogue. “Even completed to a fraction of what they're proposing would have impacts that would be irrevocable in my lifetime — and I'm 18. [...] It's really not about [the next four years]; it's about what can be accomplished in the next four years that will have impacts for the next half century, maybe more.”
What policies does Project 2025 recommend?
It is difficult to condense the policy proposals recommended by Project 2025 into a concise overview, given how wide-ranging they are, but recurring through-lines include rollbacks on civil liberties, checks and balances, economic protections, and more.
Project 2025 heavily targets civil rights protections, aiming to root out initiatives that advance equity in federal departments across the board because, the authors claim, they promote “affirmative discrimination.” Under the Department of Health and Human Services — rebranded as the “Department of Life” — gender identity would be classified only based on biological sex; heterosexual marriage would be deemed the “ideal, natural family structure”; and discrimination against same-sex couples in the adoption process would be permitted. The Project 2025 agenda also recommends banning transgender Americans and those with HIV from serving in the military.
In addition, the Department of Life would significantly roll back reproductive rights — banning mifepristone, one of the drugs used in a medication abortion, and cutting off federal funding for Planned Parenthood, among other measures.
Regarding education, Project 2025’s recommendation is simple: Abolish the Department of Education. Project 2025 also advances rhetorical justifications for the book bans and educational gag orders already impacting schools and public libraries nationwide. Nearly 70% of Gen Z voters support student loan forgiveness, but Project 2025 flatly rejects such proposals.
Loan forgiveness isn’t the only popular policy that Project 2025 threatens to roll back. While fighting climate change is a priority for young Americans as we head into the 2024 election, Project 2025 recommends drastically shrinking the Environmental Protection Agency, expanding offshore oil and natural gas drilling, and eliminating relevant offices responsible for advancing environmental justice initiatives. In fact, one of the few calls for diversity in the Project 2025 agenda is for a “diversity of scientific viewpoints” on the existence of climate change and threats to the environment.
“There are so many climate wins that we've had in the last four years, but also are now at risk because of Project 2025,” says Ariela Lara, a student organizer with the Sunrise Movement, referencing the creation of the American Climate Corps and the Inflation Reduction Act. “Just in the few months of Trump be[coming] president, the climate actions young people — me being one of them, who stayed up late nights, did actions, made calls to the Biden administration — fought tirelessly for would [risk being] undone.”
Project 2025 also proposes doing away with many of the checks and balances on the president, eroding the very structures that keep our democracy in place. Project 2025 recommends that the Department of Justice take more guided direction from the president, pursuing investigations (or not) based on the president’s desire or agenda. (Notably, Trump’s political career began with a promise to incarcerate his political opponents.)
Project 2025 also suggests replacing civil servant positions — job postings held by nonpartisan staffers who stay as administrations come and go — with appointees, as in politically aligned staffers placed in government roles to specifically advance a presidential administration’s agenda.
Says Simon, “A lot of the more specific technicalities about changing civil servant jobs to political appointees, centralizing executive power — these are all things that really cannot be undone.” Barring subsequent court challenges or intervention from later administrations, “they cannot be put back in the box.”
How are Democrats and progressive organizers mobilizing against Project 2025?
Democrats, progressive organizers, and public figures are mobilizing against Project 2025 by drawing attention to what they say is an anti-democratic and extremist agenda that could be enacted come January 2025. Given what’s at stake, they see November’s election as a dire make-or-break moment for the future of America — a future that young people, in particular, will inherit.
“The stakes are enormous,” says Natalie Fall, executive director at March for Our Lives, the anti-gun violence organization.
Simon of Gen Z for Change believes that “the bulk of this is an electoral fight”: “There's an election in November that people should be informed to go vote in, and should vote all the way down ballot too — because also having a Republican-controlled House and Senate adds to this plan a lot.”
Organizers are already working to raise awareness, bringing young people into the conversation, and making it clear how much is on the line. “There's a huge education piece that needs to happen for voters, including young people,” Fall says. “Right now, I think, for most folks, they hear Project 2025 and they don't know the specifics. They know that it's supposed to be scary, but what does it really mean?”
“A lot of our response is going to be breaking this down — not just as a headline of, ‘Oh, Project 2025, be scared of this,’ — and creating an assumption that everyone knows what it means," says Simon. "I think that's starting to happen. [Our plan] is to outline, specifically, how this impacts young people so they can make informed decisions at the ballot box.”
Organizers say that their aim is twofold: educating voters ahead of November’s election to prevent a Trump victory and a Project 2025 implementation, but also encouraging people to fight for a future that they do want — not just against one that they don’t.
Says Fall, “It's all about building and organizing for a world that we want to see, one that is more just, more free, and more green for everybody — and especially for young folks who are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis, the gun violence epidemic, and so much more.”
“This is one of my first times voting, and Donald Trump has been running for half of my life. He is deeply dangerous,” says Lara. But like other organizers, she’s energized, fueled by the memory of securing hard-fought victories under both the Trump and Biden administrations. Project 2025 may be extreme, but those who have been in the fight already say they’re ready.
“We won’t stop fighting. We won’t stop raising our voices," Lara adds. "We won’t stop being on the front lines.”
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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